Pioneer

There are two moments since last May when the absence of Sarah Luna stood out to me in particular. The first is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah’s first job after finishing her PhD was as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC. She would’ve stepped up to this crisis the way she faced all the other obstacles she faced in life, with grace, competence, and skill. All of us, whether we understand it or not, are facing a terrible foe on a scale that hasn’t happened in a hundred years when it comes to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I can’t imagine a better warrior we could have had on our side than Sarah.

The other moment was NASA’s recently closed call for astronaut candidates. I have no idea if Sarah was remotely interested in that enterprise, but she was one of a handful of people I know who would’ve made an excellent candidate. She had a PhD from Cornell, experience traveling in Asia and Africa for research, held the rank of Lieutenant in the US Public Health Service, and was about to start traveling in the rough and rugged outback of Alaska for field work for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. She was also an avid dancer and the kind of person you could lock yourself in a room with for six months and not go crazy together. That’s the kind of resume where you can easily imagine “astronaut” being the next entry.

I don’t remember the first time I met Sarah. I saw her name before I saw her, written on the piece of paper I received when I moved into Lechner Hall in August 2007. I remember it was so humid it felt like the Gulf of Mexico was curling into my throat with each breath, and I saw that Sarah was assigned to be my mentor (actually my “Lechner mom”) during my freshman year at Texas A&M. Unlike most undergrads at A&M, she was from out of state, California. Sarah grew up in the suburbified desert and scrub of southern California, much closer to the arid desert with strip malls where I grew up than College Station. We were both a long way from home in one sense, but I think we both found an adopted home we’d cherish for the rest of our lives. Maybe that’s why I was sorted with Sarah’s Lechner family.

I remember the contact we had at the end of my teenage years. I’m not fond of many of the things I remember from that age. A friend of Sarah’s wanted to embarrass her and offered “sophomore privileges” (something objectively useless that freshmen who embrace the Aggie spirit will literally do push-ups and shave their heads and do far worse for) to anyone who got her to blush in public. An hour or two later opportunity emerged. While we were eating dinner with the family at northgate I told our waitress “Isn’t Sarah totally hot?” Blood rushed into her cheeks and I never imagined it was possible for them to turn that color. God damn I was a dumbass when I was 18. But I got the SPs, alright.

I enjoyed the time I spent with Sarah, but that time was secondary to some of the other contacts I would make during that first year at Texas A&M. I met some of the people who would be instrumental in getting me through four years of aerospace engineering school in good academic shape. These were the people who helped me when I flailed around with the most basic stuff in C++, when I needed another idea to get a new solution to a problem set, who kept me sane (more or less) in a bizarre study abroad in Brazil, and who I built my senior design project with. I met the people who became the peers I imitated during my time in college and who helped me, inadvertently perhaps, prepare to continue to obtain scholarships and internships and generally keep moving my career forward. And of course, the most important of all, the most important woman I’ll ever meet in my life, that other Sarah. She happened to be good friends with Sarah Luna, too.

I look back at the pictures and I’m amazed. When did the past become so ancient? It didn’t feel like the past when we were living in it. Those long nights and sometimes-lazy, sometimes-frenetic days felt as alive with possibility as they felt thick with moisture and pollen. Surely that was always a present, catapulting us into a glorious future. I don’t understand how the present became the past.

Anyway, I don’t know if Sarah began to love dance in college or she’d taken that enthusiasm with her from Camarillo. I enjoy dance, too, but only casually. I enjoy it the way I enjoy the bass or philosophy, and not the way I enjoy my deepest passions. Clearly this was a passion for Sarah, and it was fun to see it shine through.

I’m amazed at how important all those people were to me between 2007 and 2012, and how little I see nearly all of them now. How did my life become so compartmentalized? Maybe I’m not living one life, but a series of vignettes in four- and five-year increments. I wrapped up the North Canyon chapter and moved to Texas. I wrapped up the Aggie chapter and moved to Seattle. That one got interrupted, and the Virgin chapter began in Los Angeles. That was the only time I saw Sarah in person again after we graduated from A&M, on December 26, 2016.

Annoyingly, I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of that encounter. I have thousands of pictures that I’ll never feel compelled to look at again, and somehow I never took any of that one event that I never realized mattered so much. I met Sarah’s family and talked about my job. I told them whatever unrealistic timeline we were pushing at that time for LauncherOne. They got to meet Isaac. I remember him being interested in their little fluffy dog and Sarah being amused by the cutesy crab on Isaac’s pants. Time went on, and I decided I needed to get Isaac back home. This is approximately what he would’ve looked like that day:

Sarah, my wife, was on call that day, and I wanted Isaac to get back somewhere more familiar for the evening. It was blustery under a standard-issue southern California blue sky when I strapped him into his car seat. We hugged and said our good-byes. I never imagined that would be the last time I’d speak to her or feel her touch. Why should a thought like that have occurred to me? The indifferent cruelty of the universe astounds me.

Sarah Luna packed a remarkable richness of life into her 31 years. Texas A&M, Cornell, the CDC, Alaska, and most of all her family should be proud to call her an alumnus, a colleague, a daughter, and a sister. People always go out of their way to describe how remarkable the departed are after they’re gone, but Sarah really deserves every measure of that. I believe strongly that all people are created equally, but some just seem to be higher-quality individuals than others. Sarah was one of those women.

Where she’s going, we’ll all be following her. I’m surprised, saddened, amazed again that she got there first. You should try to live your life in such a way that you do the kind of good she did on your way there.

Softly call the muster, let comrade answer “here.”

Sarah Luna, class of 2010. Here.

Laughter, Light, Wonder

For the first time in my life, as of this week I have a real life insurance policy. This isn't a knee-jerk response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This is something I should've done five years ago. Late isn't good, but it's better than never. It's part of a broader project to get my affairs in order given the general fragility of life.

Like Randy Pausch, I've also spent some time thinking about what I'd want to say to my kids in the event that I won't be there to see them grow up. Unlike Pausch, I have the luxury of not actually having any sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I might not wake up tomorrow, but I might also live another 70 years. Recognizing that the former might be the case, I went ahead and got writing. Since the odds are good that my kids might never read these words until they're in middle age, I thought perhaps they might do more good here:

My Dear Children,

Life is a strange and complex and often contradictory thing. So often it drags on and on. In the end it’s over all too soon. Like everyone, I wanted my life to be longer. I at least wanted to live long enough to see you grow up, and to help you through the joys and hardships of your youth and maidenhood. In the end none of us is master of their fate, and I’m sorry that my help to you had to end where it did.

Of all the things in my life, nothing brought me more meaning than being your father. I hope your memories of me are such that you know this is true and don’t suspect me of being ironic. If your memory is faithful and honest enough you will remember times that I was frustrated with you and didn’t seem to take complete joy in your presence. Life is contradictory indeed. But as thin as I stretched myself caring for you and your mother and my career simultaneously, I always knew that you were worth every sacrifice I made. You were my greatest love and greatest joy, in the final ultimate truth.

It’s difficult for me to describe how I felt changed after you were born. It is as though, up to that point, I was the master and protagonist of the narrative of my life. After September 13, 2015, you were. First with Isaac, then with Lucy, then with Mira. Becoming a parent, if you’re a well-adjusted, decent human being, makes you a bit of a fanatic. I became fanatical for giving you the best life I could, even though the resources Sarah and I had at our disposal when you were born seemed rather meager. I ran myself ragged trying to make sure you were fed and loved and cared for in the best way I could manage.

It would give me great pride for you to find this same joy and meaning in your own lives, through your own children. Of course, like all creatures, I want my DNA to pass on in the great river of life, and you are now the vessels that carry those genes. But you are the masters of your own lives and you must make this and all the other supremely important decisions of life for yourselves. I would never want to make these decisions for you anyway, even if I were still alive.

So you need to decide for yourselves whether you’ll have children, and if you do, if you’ll do it while you’re young or if you’ll wait until your 30s or even your 40s. Why did Sarah and I make the decision we made, to begin with Isaac immediately after we wed? We were young and beautiful and the idea seemed so lovely to join each other and blossom like the springtime flowers. Your uncle (my brother) Matt died six months before our wedding. That drove home the knowledge that nothing in our lives was certain and that everything could be taken away in a stupid little moment. You would do well to remember this, too. So, if we wanted to have children eventually, why not start right away?

It was unimaginably difficult, doing what we did, raising two children out of a one-bedroom apartment while Sarah worked through residency and I drove back and forth between Los Feliz and Long Beach or El Segundo every day. If we had seen how difficult and how painful it would be at the beginning, I’m not sure that we would’ve had the mental and spiritual strength to begin. Maybe we would’ve waited to get married or Sarah would’ve taken an IUD. Had we done one of those things, though, Isaac and Lucy wouldn’t be here. I have no regrets for what we did. I just don’t wish that pain and stress on anyone else. Does that seem contradictory? Perhaps the macro-scale universe has a sort of superposition of joy and pain the same way the micro-scale universe has a superposition of quanta.

Diving into parenthood in our youth, consequences be damned, yielded the most significant meaning of our lives. It also was very difficult. You should decide for yourselves what path forward you think is best.

You know what the church teaches about contraception. Does that seem like some kind of mind retrovirus left over from the Bronze Age? Sarah and I followed this teaching anyway. Whatever our faults (and there are many), neither of us is stupid or anti-feminist. If you remove the church teaching, we probably would’ve used contraception, but add that influence and we were happy to be fruitful and multiply. You should pay attention to the influences you cultivate in your lives. They may trigger things you never expected in yourself. We all learn by imitating each other until we understand, so choose who you imitate carefully.

In any event, should you marry, and should you decide to have children at some point, you may decide like a majority of couples even within Catholicism to take more direct control over your own fertility. I can’t fault you for doing so, but I encourage you to listen to what the church has to say. Perhaps you might find something kindled in you that wants to do for your spouse what spring does for the cherry trees (aside: When you have a moment you should read the poetry of Pablo Neruda). I think in a way that’s what happened for your mother and me.

I don’t recommend having children without marrying. Having children enters you into an indissoluble bond with your kids and will rewrite your priorities in life up and down. Fully committing yourself to, and receiving commitment from, another responsible, lovely adult, who will share your life in a similar way first is a good idea, to say the least.

I’m assuming in this whole discussion that you’re interested in what the Catholic Church has to say. Sarah and I made a commitment to the church and to raise you in it. I spent a significant portion of my life considering myself an atheist, and even after becoming a committed Catholic my faith was tenuous. If you need to wander in the desert of atheism or agnosticism, or if you convert to another creed, I certainly can’t fault you from my own life experience. As long as you have come to your present thoughtfully, humbly, and lovingly, I encourage you to follow where the truth and the right seem to lead you.

Neither Sarah nor I were raised in the Catholic Church. You might be interested in how we wound up there. As of this writing the tendency in America is for people to move away from Catholicism rather than toward it, so perhaps this seems like water running uphill. I can’t speak to why your mother became Catholic, but I can try to express what moved me in that direction.

People matter. If there’s nothing else that seems constant in life to you, that should be constant like bedrock, constant like the beat of a pulsar, constant like the speed of light in a vacuum. If you move through life operating as though people are obstacles, objects, or obstructions, who gives a damn what else you’ve done? If you should gain the world, and lose your soul, what profit is it to you? I think Jesus was trying to express something like that.

The philosophical temptation I always had in life was to see things in a materialistic and mechanistic way. The basic assumption that science is built on is that there exists a set of rock-steady laws that are allowed to play out like a mathematical proof. It works remarkably well, doesn’t it? The predictive power of this method is so compelling that I feel tempted to say “Forget anything else. What else do you need?” There’s a story that Napoleon asked a noted astrophysicist of his day why he didn’t speak about the will of God in his derivations and predictions of the movement of the planets. “I have no need of that hypothesis,” he replied simply.

Follow this idea to its conclusion, and people are basically iterated chemical reactions. That’s a problem. People need to be more than matter to matter. What does it concern you, how kerosene burns with compressed air, or how fluorine etches semiconductor chips, or even how the complex organics of synthetic drugs are manufactured? None of these actions are ethically compelling in any way. Yet the suffering and joy of human beings is immediately, pressingly compelling. It’s not just that humans are a particularly complex sort of chemistry that then requires an adjunct of ethics along with the equations of state. We’re different, in a way that a worldview too fixated on matter and physical law alone is impotent to speak of meaningfully.

So I was uncomfortable being an atheist and I looked for something else. I won’t pretend that I fairly considered all the philosophies and religions people have put forward over the history of civilization. Lump together the most common 90% of the beliefs and creeds of current humanity and I didn’t even look at most of that. Unless you become a scholar of philosophy, religion, or history, you won’t either. There isn’t time in our too-short lives.

Biased as it was, I looked at what my eyes found. I imitated my friends and family and tried their ideas on for size. I found myself compelled, in that limited mix, toward Catholicism. This was primarily a non-rational compulsion at first. I found myself enjoying going to church, something that never happened to me as a child. I found myself finding the ceremony and magisterium at church meaningful, ditto.

Do you want to break this apart to the base psychology? Partly I appreciated the simple sensations of Catholic Mass. I liked the aroma of incense, the warm embrace of the sign of peace, the rising and falling on the pews and kneelers, the heartbreakingly beautiful and feminine English and Latin from the choir. Smells and bells, they call it. My personality is average in many respects, but I’m at least two standard deviations from the norm when it comes to openness to new experience. Part of me just likes to wander and dabble. Catholicism was appealingly different to my Methodist roots, yet familiar enough to be accessible. I wanted to immigrate, but not too far from home.

All that made me interested in being at church, but none of that is enough to commit to raising you, my children, in the Church and saying the Nicene Creed at least weekly with at least some sense of directness. Think about what the Church teaches about the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Think about how diametrically opposed that is to all of your actual experience of life. The rules of the road are the same for everyone, right? No one gets to be a miracle worker, everyone has to die pointlessly, no one gets to live again. Then, the Gospels say, comes Jesus, and everything is turned upside down for him. This needs to be literally true or there is no reality to Christianity.

Since the events of the Gospels happened two millennia ago it’s not possible to evaluate whether they really happened in the way we can evaluate recent events. There’s no forensic evidence or other sources to look at. Perhaps it all really happened! Indeed. Then again, with no smoking gun that persisted and with so many other legends and myths we so readily dismiss out of hand, isn’t it completely natural to assume it’s all just a story? Perhaps.

Those ideas troubled me as I dove into what the Church taught about how people should treat each other and what’s right and wrong. I appreciated that the Church was fixated on the dignity of humanity. There’s a no-nonsense quality to it. Like, “Hang your metaphysics and your solipsism and your theory and just fucking take care of people for a change.” That’s what Catholic social teaching seemed like to me. I thought the Church was absolutely correct about abortion, that it’s abhorrent, and that this was the right place to be standing orthogonal to the march of western culture. With the philosophical structure of the Catholic Church you can get from here to there. If you’re doing it all yourself, how do you do that? I couldn’t figure it out. The Church already seemed to be going in more-or-less the direction I wanted to go, and she had been doing this for the last two thousand years. It made sense to hitchhike.

That’s not to say that there was nothing that unsettled me. The Church teaches that homosexuality, masturbation, and sex outside of marriage are all inherently sinful. Regarding same sex relationships, especially, that seems backward to me. Is it so backward it reveals the whole enterprise as something other than a truth-telling thing? If you judge me to backward, retrograde, insufficiently woke, or just stupid and hateful for doing this, I will understand your point of view. Speaking from the future, you’re more likely to be on the right side of history than me. What I found was that, where these teachings directly conflicted with what I felt compelled to do, on balance I found myself trusting the Church enough to think it’s a truth-telling thing anyway. When the teachings didn’t directly impact my life, I found people who were impacted who believed the Church was the way anyway. Maybe I just wasn’t woke enough and I was rationalizing.

I think what made the most sense, what pushed me over the line from having something like faith outside the church to having something like faith inside the church, was the idea that God is love. The idea that that’s a piece of the bedrock of reality and not just a fun little slogan got me there. God is that which is most mysterious, that thing that set the laws of motion and fundamental constants and doesn’t just obey them, that thing before the Big Bang and that sets the boundaries in which we can know what is real. Take that idea, as God, and then add this. That God is also love, that which cares for all that’s worth caring for, that stokes the beautiful fire of eros, that works and aches only to protect and nurture, never to break down by the rule book. I had enough experiences in my life that convinced me that the union of those ideas of God was possible that it made sense to take the jump. Does that seem crazy? I did what I did. You may be my judge, and by default, I’ll accept your judgement.

However I got there, I got there. I made the leap non-rationally, then rationally. For all the reasons discussed, the Catholic Church is like a garment that only seems to half fit me sometimes. But it feels better, and more truthful to my self, than being naked.

It’s entirely possible that you’ll be more faithful than I was, not less. In that case know that I would support you earnestly if I could be there to do so. You should pray and look into your soul and think rationally about what your vocation is. If you find a vocation to the priesthood or to holy orders, then the best thing you can do is follow it. Nothing would make me more proud. Looking into my own soul, I’m convinced that I’m not cut from that cloth. I was made to cleave myself to womanhood in marriage. But you may be built differently from me.

One piece of freedom I wanted to make sure you would have is the freedom to follow the careers you find yourselves most suited to. Your mother and I won’t leave a family business for you to inherit, but even if this was the case, we’d want you to find for yourselves what you want to do with your working lives. I do encourage you to think carefully about what your options are, though, and I encourage you to find any way you can do work that’s meaningful without being draining and overwhelming.

That said, don’t be a lawyer. Don’t be a doctor.

I have no doubt that you’d all make excellent doctors, and that’s part of the polylemma you’ll face. You’re so talented, you’ll be able to take on almost any task that would seem supernaturally hard to an ordinary person and achieve the goal. If you do so, but wind up miserable in the process, what have you gained? There are many opportunities to do work that’s meaningful and makes the world a better place that don’t involve throwing your life in a trash compactor the way medicine does.

Conversely, I encourage you to consider the practice of engineering. When I look at the career paths of my family, I feel like I lucked out winding up where I am. If you become an engineer, your undergraduate education will be arduous and difficult compared to many of your peers. You’ll be annoyed that you’ll be more constrained with coursework and less free to ramble through your late teens and early 20s. But in exchange for that you’ll have a lucrative career available for you at age 22, with no advanced degree, where you can do work that will impact people’s lives for the better while working on interesting challenges. I think it’s a pretty good deal.

Are there any particular specialties within engineering I recommend? I’ve enjoyed working in rocket propulsion and launch vehicle design. Partly this is because it’s fascinating work that has a real chance of impacting humanity for the better, and partly it’s because this work lines up well with my interests. I happened to come of age during a renaissance in rocket propulsion in the United States. You might not have the same opportunities here I had, and you should pay attention to where the most interesting and exciting work is happening.

Given my interests as a child, it seemed like aerospace was where I needed to go. Perhaps I should’ve been more open to vocations not so obvious in childhood. In retrospect I think I would’ve enjoyed nuclear engineering. The set of physical laws that go into nuclear machines are richer than anywhere else in engineering, and machines that make nearly endless power by splitting matter apart are deeply compelling. If the long-awaited nuclear renaissance ever comes about, your helping it happen will be a wonderful way to make life better for your grandchildren and their descendants.

My respect for civil engineers has grown as well. The basic infrastructure of modern life might look bland to the unappreciative eye, but each bridge, overpass, and pipeline is unique and took thought from an engineer’s soul to conceive. That sounds like a nice way to make a living to me. My personality resonates with the mechanical, but electrical engineering is a deeply interesting field as well, of course, as is computer science and engineering. I just never particularly enjoyed coding. You should try it, and if you like it, this could be a good career for you, too.

An advanced degree is not essential to an engineering career, but I would encourage you to consider getting a master’s immediately after graduation if you become an engineer. There are options to fast track this at some universities that you should consider. I don’t think this will make you a better engineer per se, but it will give your career the most flexibility at the earliest possible time. You’ll be eligible for positions that require advanced degrees and won’t be pigeonholed to very specific niche work around an area of PhD specialization. I think I have the savoir faire I need with just a bachelor’s, but there have been a few jobs that intrigued me (among them astronaut selection) that I was ineligible for because of my lack of an advanced degree.

You should probably not get a PhD unless you’re very sure that there’s a specific area of work you want to advance. With a PhD you’ll be overqualified for many positions you’d otherwise be considered for, so be sure your area of specialization is somewhere you really want to be for the next few decades. It’s inherently painful to deal with academia long enough to obtain any kind of terminal degree, so this is the kind of path you must pursue only for the right reasons. If you know there’s something you want to do with a clear path that runs through a PhD, though, by all means, pursue it.

Of course, there are many other careers that you can and should consider beyond the broad strokes here. I wish I could be there to discuss what you’re looking for and what your talents are to help you find the best path to meaningful happiness in work. Whatever you decide, it will be best if the decision comes from within you and isn’t imposed from outside. Follow your bliss, and I’ll be proud of you.

I hope that you might find yourselves facing a dilemma your mother and I didn’t have the privilege to confront, whether you’d like to live most of your life here or on the planet Mars. Space travel was such a rarified thing during my life. Making it something accessible to ordinary people was the greatest, noblest passion of my career. Perhaps, if things go very well on this front, you’ll be able to set sail for the planets and the micro-worlds of the asteroids beyond Earth. Historians will say this was the vision of men like Musk and Bezos, but you should know better. The blood of tens of thousands of women and men ran hot with this idea, and we worked as hard as we thought we could to make it happen. Think for a moment that I did some little part of making this happen, and then you should consider what you want to do, assuming you face this choice someday.

I can’t imagine that I would choose to relocate permanently beyond Earth, either to Mars or to some artificial world built of stuff from the Moon or the asteroids. I love Earth too much. Earth may have begat life, but now that life has reshaped Earth in its image. I would love to see another world up close, to feel the crunch of its regolith under my feet, but I don’t think I’d want to live the rest of my life there. You should consider what you’re giving up by leaving Earth behind.

Consider also, though, that human civilization was built by people who gave up what they knew in favor of the hope of the frontier. Someone had to leave the valleys of east Africa, had to cross the land bridge across the Bearing Sea, had to sail in little outrigger canoes from one island to another across the Pacific Ocean. Many suffered from their wanderlust, and you should know that you might too, but many also found new lands, ready to give the human experience new microcosms to call its own. Now you might get to do the same with another full-size world. Whatever you decide, I understand, and if you take the leap you should know that I would be proud to know my generation was the last to stay rooted to the Earth that bore us.

I’m sorry that I seem to be leaving this planet and our country in a terrible state for you to inherit. Maybe that’s self-centered of me to think that I could somehow put a dent in the rising concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, the erosion of respect for science, and the insanity and fetish for authoritarianism that’s gripping American politics at this moment. I recognize how little I can do to turn the ship here, but it still pains me to think about where you might be headed.

Remember that politics wasn’t always like this. I remember a time when reasonable people could stand on opposite sides of the aisle and still respect and work with each other. I remember a time when everyone recognized limits to the lust for power, and excursions would not be tolerated. You can have this again, someday. Remember also that there was a time when lead paint, atmospheric nuclear testing, triethyl lead in gasoline, chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, and asbestos insulation were all tolerated. We realized what rape we were committing to Earth and to our fellow man and woman, and we stopped these practices. You can do this too, with climate change and the new crises you’ll find.

Moving beyond the practical, I wonder if there’s anything profound to say. When I was young, I was deeply interested in philosophy. I was curious about what other people had thought, and it gave me a little thrill to consider ideas novel, offensive, or – best of all – convincing and persuasive. I also wanted to “figure it all out.” So much of my life was focused around academic success, where I was being judged constantly on my ability to quickly absorb and understand concepts. Why shouldn’t I try to figure out what made everything tick, down at the bottom of existence?

That was my brief foray into narcissism, I suppose. I realize how absurd the notion seems now. Still, I wasn’t comfortable drawing a line and saying “Alright, I guess I won’t understand any more about this, and I don’t care.” As my life went on the banal realities caught up with me. I spent less and less time trying to figure out what the meaning of life was, whether free will exists, what consciousness is, and which system of ethics was closest to the truth. When there’s work and a household to keep and children to change and read to and rock and play with, there’s barely enough time to sleep, let alone find the profound grandness of life.

I hope, reflecting on that, that you don’t find yourself bogged down long in the search for ultimate truth. That search is worth going on, but I confess I haven’t found a way out of the conclusion the wiser older people seemed to reach before me – that it’s more about the questions than about the answers. Maybe you’ll be more clever than I was. I certainly hope so and won’t be surprised when this happens. Still, you may find yourself needing to be content with unanswerable questions, and that’s okay.

The poet Mary Oliver wrote this about a life well-lived:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.”

People sometimes want things they shouldn’t want, and don’t want things that they should want. Leah Libresco, a writer I admired, said half-facetiously that we know this to be true because there exist serial killers and people who hate math. It’s not enough to dive after the fluid pleasures of life. I trust, however, that your desires are generally good. You will want to do the right thing and to be with people who are good. Your appetites for food, comfort, sex, wine and beer, companionship, achievement, and justice are all good. Don’t let them dominate you, but let the soft animal of your body and the conjoined twin fires of your spirit and soul grow and love and dive into the goodness of life. I trust that you will be good, and I would reassure you that you are if I were still there.

There was nothing in my life I loved more than you. I loved your mother ferociously. I would’ve gladly laid down my life for hers without a second thought. That love was like a two-dimensional schematic compared to the rich three-dimensional love I felt for all of you immediately. I would trade everything in my life now, including my life itself, if it guaranteed you all happiness and love for the rest of your many days. I’m sorry that I didn’t live to see you grow up into the wonderful adults I know you’ll be, but I’m glad I was able to be part of your journey in the beginning. Go forth, live, love, be kind to your mother, be passionate and loving with your spouses, be gentle and adoring of your children, make your own paths forward. The world is better because you’re in it.

Love,
Your dad